Good Room

Brooklyn, NY

$15.00 - $17.00

This event is 21 and over

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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s formative years were spent communing with nature on Orcas Island in the northwest region of Washington state, a place she describes as “one of the most magical and peaceful places I have ever been.” Though she wouldn’t begin experimenting with modular synthesis until many years later, her creative work continues to be infused with and inspired by the vitality and serenity of Orcas. Smith left the island to attend Berklee College of Music, where she studied composition and sound engineering, initially focusing on her voice as her primary instrument, before switching to classical guitar and piano. She employed many of the skills she refined in college in her indie-folk band Ever Isles, but a fateful encounter with a neighbor who lent her a Buchla 100 synthesizer, had a profound effect on her. Mesmerized by the Buchla’s potential, she explains “I got so distracted and enamored with the process of making sounds with it that I abandoned the next Ever Isles album.” Starting with rhythmic patterns and melodic pulses, she soon began sculpting lush and exciting worlds of sound.

Growing up in Ecuador, Maria Usbeck was immersed in salsa, merengue, bachata and Andean music, but was more attracted to German and American culture than her own, eventually moving to America at 17 to attend to art school. After five years of fronting new wave outfit Selebrities and writing songs in English, she knew it was time to let the mother tongue speak. That impulse manifested itself directly in her debut solo album, Amparo, which reads like an exotic travel diary - music made by a perceptive explorer to tap into the shared core of human expression.